


To Love Another, Is to Cherish Life Itself

by RavenReyes0G



Category: Red White & Royal Blue - Casey McQuiston
Genre: Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Boys In Love, Canon Compliant, Canon Gay Relationship, Dorks in Love, Established Relationship, Fluff and Angst, Gay, I Wrote This Instead of Sleeping, Idiots in Love, Love Letters, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Mild Hurt/Comfort, Mild Language, Not graphic but henry is not having a fun time at the beginning, Queen Mary sucks (and so does Philip) but they're only mentioned, Sad and Happy, Sorry!, True Love, alex comforting henry, basically just two emails the author thought of and now has a lot of feels about, because...he is a dog, depression sucks ass, firstprince owns my heart, fluff? ish, henry is depressed, henry is sad and so is the author, i don't have the energy to edit this so its probably bad, i love david even though he has exactly zero lines, love emails?, man these boys are whipped, non canon emails, they're just so in love with each other, they're such dorks omfg
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-08
Updated: 2020-06-08
Packaged: 2021-03-03 22:53:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,359
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24603451
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RavenReyes0G/pseuds/RavenReyes0G
Summary: Henry is dealing with a rather terrible bout of depression. He emails Alex, Alex emails back (takes place after Alex flies back to the US after the ring scene).Basically my take on two missing emails from Red, White, and Royal Blue in which Alex and Henry are totally adorable dorks who are completely in love with each other. And also know how to comfort the other.
Relationships: Alex Claremont-Diaz & June Claremont-Diaz, Alex Claremont-Diaz/Henry Fox-Mountchristen-Windsor, Arthur Fox & Henry Fox-Mountchristen-Windsor, Arthur Fox/Catherine Fox-Mountchristen-Windsor, Beatrice Fox-Mountchristen-Windsor & Henry Fox-Mountchristen-Windsor, Henry Fox-Mountchristen-Windsor & Philip Fox-Mountchristen-Windsor
Comments: 17
Kudos: 128





	To Love Another, Is to Cherish Life Itself

Henry is slumped on the floor, empty brandy glass tossed haphazardly to the side, David curled up by his feet. Bea went to bed over an hour ago, but he can’t manage to drag himself from their joint parlor to his bedroom. There is something undeniably wrong about returning to the bed he and Alex shared just the night before. Now, it’s empty. Nothing but the faint scent of Alex’s cologne and the flicker of memory to keep the bed warm. 

He’s lonely. And maudlin. And more than a little drunk. 

His “moods” decided to kick back up in full swing nearly the moment Alex’s plane took off, taking a piece of Henry’s heart with it. It hadn’t helped that Philip had been a right all morning over Alex’s “unexpected visit” and all the “harm he could do to the crown’s reputation if the press got word” blah, blah, blah. 

It was, quite simply, _too fucking much_. 

With shaking hands, Henry pulls his phone from his pocket, and open the email app. Nothing new that was worth reading. His last email from Alex was from over six hours ago. He began to draft and email, stops, reconsiders, and deletes it. 

Alex was probably asleep, right? He didn’t need Henry bothering him at all hours of the night over something as stupid as one of his moods. Even still...he always felt better talking it out with Alex. Even if that talking might take several hours if Alex was asleep. God knows Henry would be awake when he responds.

He drafts it quickly, emotion springing up in his eyes as he recounts some of the more painful moments of his life laid bare for Alex to read. He still couldn’t believe where he was. That _he_ was sitting in his parlor drafting an email to Alex fucking Claremont-Diaz, his boyfriend, after just having seen him not more than 15 hours ago. Truly, no one could’ve predicted that to come out of this year. He sure as hell couldn’t have. 

He presses send before he can give it a second thought and waits, hand absently petting David’s soft fur. He wonders what Alex is doing (sleeping, hopefully) or what he looks like (gorgeous, always). The second half of his heart, somewhere far away on American soil, beautiful brown eyes tired from jet lag and sleep deprivation. Henry images Alex hunched over at his desk, always working even if his eyes are nearly fully shut. Gazing into the dying embers of the hearth, he considers what he sent. 

\---

_ Alex,  _

_ (bare with me here, bea and I played a drinking game earlier- well, I played and bea sipped seltzer- and it’s been a rather rough 12ish hours without you) _

_ There is a not inconsiderable part of me that believes I am unworthy of love. I don’t know whether it’s depression, or my family, or depression reinforced by my family. Or visa versa.  _

_ Regardless, it’s there.  _

_ It’s difficult to explain how much of me is encompassed by that hole in my heart. Sometimes, on the good days, it's small - merely a child scooping out a few handfuls of sand from a sandbox. There, but not overwhelming. And then there are the other days, the bad days, where it feels like there is a great gaping hole in my chest. All-encompassing and threatening to suck all the light from the world into it’s cold void of darkness. When I’m curled up on the floor, my heart bleeding crimson onto the carpet, even though it is stained with nothing but my tears. Those days are hard. But not the hardest.  _

_ The hardest days are when I am helpless. When I open my mouth to scream or cry or something, and nothing comes out. The darkness has stolen my voice, and I am helpless against it. When I’m alone and afraid and numb to pain because my mind has entrapped me it's its golden cage of molten metal and everywhere I touch burns.  _

_ It’s Philip in the dining hall, his daily snide remarks over my lack of general success in what the crown dreams to be a suitable lifestyle. It’s Gran over tea, her eyes cold and unfeeling even as they burrow through me, turning my veins to fire with shame. Because she knows I know what she’s thinking. And it hurts. And worst of all, it’s mum. Mum who had all the fire stolen from her the night dad passed away. She lost a husband. I lost both my parents.  _

_ Is it bad I want to hate her for it? Perhaps that’s selfish. She did her best, I know she did. And sometimes I see her coming back in fits and starts. I can still hear her voice, loud and full of laughter. Sweet and soft lulling me to sleep with a song about stars. Burning and fiery as she argued with Gran about something rotten she said. The hum, the life, in her chest I felt in mine.  _

_ And then one day it was gone. No smoke, or fanfare, or one last final stand for glory. Just...gone. Like a candle snuffed out before the wick could truly burn.  _

_ Did I ever tell you I held my dad’s hand as he went? _

_ It’s true. No one ever tells you how bloody loud it is, waiting for someone to die. We all knew it was happening, had known for months. It was only a matter of time, a matter of waiting long agonizing hours in the hospital rooms, or fitful nights of anxiety when I couldn’t bare to drag myself from the great, empty cavern of my room (I know you hate it too) into mum’s because I knew I would find her crying. And I knew there was nothing I could do to help. People say that death is quiet, but it's not. _

_ It’s all so loud. _

_ I remember the hospital room. It was sterile and smelled of lemon cleaning products and antiseptic, but there was something else there. Something heavy and awful, like a bowling ball tucked into the crevice where my heart used to be. Something that beat in tandem with the monitor by his bedside. Until it flat lined. Until he stopped breathing, and Bea’s arms were around me, and a part of me died alongside him. The smell of death. The crushing feeling of helplessness.  _

__

_ I think that’s my greatest fear, being helpless. I watched my dad die in front of me, I watched mum flare and sputter out, I watched Philip turn himself into something he wasn’t simply because he had to. I watched Bea run and turn her life into shambles because she couldn’t hurt, or punch, or scream at the grief. I watched myself disappear, day by day, until I no longer had it in me to care of what became of my shell. What becomes of the Prince of Wales when there is nothing left inside him? _

_ And then you came along. You, with your inappropriate jokes, hard-headedness, and general wrongness about which is the best Star Wars movie (it is absolutely Jedi, I don’t make the rules). You with your light, and happiness, and ineffable brightness. You with your strength, and determination, and unyielding belief that people are good. You, Alex.  _

_ You.  _

_ You stopped my world, and made it spin on a separate axis simply because you demanded it so. You taught me to be bold, and brave, and sometimes insanely stupid.  _

_ And when you called me at god knows when in the morning to complain about the great turkey calamity, I knew I loved you. When you texted me stupid pictures of dogs in sweaters and made fun of my Harry Potter house, I knew I loved you. And when you kissed me back on that bench on New Years Eve, tasting of some horrid combination of champagne and lipstick, I knew I loved you. _

_ And it scared me.  _

_ It scared me into running away, into closing myself off, into fitting once again into the role of a cardboard cutout prince with a predetermined destiny. _

_ It scared me because for the first time since my father died, I wanted something. I wanted something that would force me to break out of the gold plated cage I had locked myself into for years. I wanted something that would uproot the tree of my life and shatter all previous conceptions of reality (because you, darling, are nothing if not life-shattering). I wanted you. And I was helpless to stop it. _

_ But then I convinced myself that I couldn’t have you, you wouldn’t want me, not really. You wouldn’t want the mangled, messed up, broken body of a boy who didn’t deserve anyone’s love. You wouldn’t want the moods, and the secrecy, and the darkness that came with someone as imperfect as me.  _

_ And then, somehow, inexplicably, you did.  _

_ You, a person whose passion and vivacity cannot be described within the confines of the English lexicon (maybe they have a word for it in Spanish, I don’t know, maybe you’ll teach me it someday). You, Alexander Gabriel Claremont-Diaz, First Son of the United States of America, loved me.  _

_ And you didn’t just love me, you showed me.  _

_You showed me when you accosted me (yes, accosted - oh don’t roll your eyes, it was rather saucy of you after all) under a portrait of a great - definitely bisexual- founding father. You showed me when you took me apart all those nights, with your mouth, and your words, and your eyes, and then somehow put me back together again. You showed me when you whispered sweet nothings in my ear and told me that everything will be alright because we’re here, and we’re together, and that’s enough. _

_ You showed me when you brought me to your most sacred places, and revealed the deepest reaches of your heart on late night phone calls, emails, and the minutes between our sexual bliss and the soft, pillowed walls of sleep. And, shockingly, I felt myself do the same.  _

_ You show me every damn day.  _

_ You taught a shred of a person, to love again. To believe that love was real, and powerful, and could come to us in the strangest of ways, at the strangest of times (perhaps in the form of a half-Mexican, curly-haired, bisexual disaster with his heart on his sleeve and his eyes on a better future for everyone). You, my love, taught me to want to live, to live for life, and not for others.  _

_ You showed me that maybe, just maybe, I deserved to be loved. Not for who I could be, but for who I am. I don’t know if I believe that yet, but I’m starting to.  _

_ I really think I am.  _

_ And so, in rather simple summation for an obscenely long email, I love you. I have loved you from the first moment I met you, from the first time we kissed, and from all our firsts after that. I loved you then, I loved you now, and I’ll love you forever after.  _

_ Yours (exceptionally maudlin and slightly drunk),  _

_ Henry _

**PS. From Emily Dickinson to Susan Huntington Gilbert c. 1852:**

  
  


_ …Susie, forgive me Darling, for every word I say – my heart is full of you, none other than you is in my thoughts, yet when I seek to say to you something not for the world, words fail me. If you were here – and Oh that you were, my Susie, we need not take at all, our eyes would whisper for us, and your hand fast in mine… _

\---

It’s embarrassingly maudlin. Sappy and over romantic, but that’s who he is becoming, apparently. That’s who Alex Claremont-Diaz is turning him in to, or rather, pulling out of him. Maybe that version of Henry was always there, just waiting for the right excuse to come out of the closet, so to speak. He wonders how Alex will respond to it. He doesn’t have to wait long - not even 20 minutes after he sends it, his phone dings with an incoming email. He opens the notification, relief flooding through him as he reads Alex’s first lines. 

\---

_ H, _

_ (bare with me, I am severely jet lagged and running on more caffeine than Zahara on election week...okay, maybe not that much, but still) _

_ Fuck. I’m not you or June, I’m not good with words, so I guess I’ll just get right to the point.  _

_ I love you.  _

_ I mean, you know that now and I’ve told you about a million times, but I mean it. I really, really fucking love you.  _

_ You helped me understand so much of myself that I never could’ve before. And I’m not talking in terms of sexuality (though, thanks for that), I mean it in the small ways. The laughing at my crude jokes, the listening to my ramblings on the phone at all hours of the night, the way you kiss me when we’ve been apart for so long, like it’s the first time we’ve kissed, like you refuse to let it be the last. The way that you let me be me. The way you've never asked me to change, not one bit. The way you love this imperfect mess of a human who can't help but love you back. And there's so much I love about you.  _

_ I love the way your brow creases just slightly when you're thinking hard about something. I love your smile, and your lips, and other parts of you too that do filthy things to me in a fashion dear Queen V would absolutely hate. I love the way you laugh when you don’t mean to, a sound that flies out of your (glorious) mouth loud and surprised and deep. If I could bottle it and get drunk on it every night, I would. Hell if I don’t do that already.  _

_ I love the way you love Wagner, and David, and Bake Off. I love the way you love classics, and Jane Austin because you are a huge, romantic sap at heart. I love the way you love to visit the children in the cancer ward because you want to make them happy, to alleviate their pain, even if just for a moment.  _

_ I love your totally adorable, completely incorrect opinion of the superior Star Wars movie (it is and always will be Empire, just give up now). _

_ I love your maddeningly posh accent, and the way it sounds when you shout my name into the night. I love the way your face crinkles when I say something crass. I love the way you pretend to hate American fast food but I’ll be damned if I’ve ever seen someone eat a McDonald’s hamburger faster.  _

_ I love how much you care about the people you help, how much you’re always trying to be better and do good. I love how big your heart is, bigger still than the dark hole you describe. I love how selfless you are, how undyingly kind, and brilliant you are in the face of everything you’ve gone through.  _

_ I love how brave you are.  _

_ I hate that you feel unworthy of love. You’re so unbelievably worthy it’s impossible to describe. You deserve all the love and happiness in the world, because of who you are- not because of what’s been done to you.  _

_ And I hate that you’ve suffered. I wish I could face every person who has ever hurt you and punch them square in the jaw, Texas bar brawl style. I wish I could fill the space in you that’s hurting with all of my love, so it will never harm you again. But I can’t. I feel that, the helplessness, and I hate it too.  _

_ But damn it all to hell if it didn’t make you the person you are today. And some, selfish, part of me isn’t sorry for that. Because you, Henry George Edward James Fox-Mountchristian-Windsor, and your obnoxiously long name, are un-fucking-believable. _

_ You are kind, and sweet, and bold. You love with a heart so big it nearly swallows me whole. You love like nobody I have ever met before. You make me feel happy, and proud, and loved.  _

_ You make me brave. _

__

_ And goddamnit, I wish I could bring your dad back from the dead so he could tell you how fucking proud he of you, of all you’ve done, and fought for, and love. I know I am. _

_ I am so fucking in love with you it hurts.  _

_ They say that the best thing in life one can hope for is to live said life without regrets. I used to think that was bullshit, now I think it’s what scares me the most.  _

_ I don’t have many regrets, truly, but if I had to pick the most painful - it would be not finding you sooner. Maybe if I had talked to you, maybe if I had tried again after Rio, maybe if I hadn’t wasted so much time being - how did you put it? - so “hard-headed.” Maybe then we could’ve had something, been something sooner.  _

_ Maybe if.  _

_ Or maybe not. Maybe we were destined to find each other this way, fall in love the same way every time history rewrites itself.  _

_ I’m not naive. I don’t read horoscopes or believe that when the stars align in a certain way, some events are meant to be. But I do know, with absolute certainty, that you are my soulmate. In this life, and the next (if that exists). I know our souls are inexplicably intertwined. Like two hearts knotted by a red string, whatever tf that means. Our hearts beat as one. _

_ You, we, our love is unshakable. We’ve gone through ups and downs, twists and turns, and yet we always find our way back to each other. Be it crawling, running, or fucking flying. We do. We always will. And can’t wait until the day I can tell the rest of the world that this beautiful, smart, sexy, brave man is mine. Mine to hold, and to cherish, and to never let go. Mine to love.  _

_ I do, Henry, I love you.  _

_ I will never stop loving you, not even when the sun burns itself from the sky, and the world is dark and cold. Not even then, because I know our love will always keep me safe. I will never stop loving you, because I’m not even sure if that is something I am physically capable of doing. I know it isn’t. Our love is the strongest thing I know, we love each other despite the odds, not in spite of them. No matter what the future holds, I can venture into it bravely if I remember that.  _

_ And if you ever forget that, I will be here to remind you. Today, tomorrow, and the day after that. Forever.  _

_ I love you. _

_ A _

**PS. Rockwell Kent to Frances Kent -- 1929:**

_ And as I love you utterly, so have you now become the whole world of my spirit. It is beside and beyond anything that you can ever do for me; it lies in what you are, dear love — to me so infinitely lovely that to be near you, to see you, hear you, is now the only happiness, the only life, I know.  _

\---

Henry reads the email, then reads it again, each time soaking up more and more of Alex’s words. Something in him burns bright and insistent at the thought, the recent memory of Alex’s soft lips on his, his soft southern drawl and warm coffee brown eyes.

And something in him relaxes, a little bit of the days stress seeping from his shoulders until he feels calm enough to attempt sleep. Dragging himself, and David, from the floor, he stumbles to his bed, nearly collapsing from exhaustion he didn’t know he was harboring. 

Before he closes his eyes for the final time, because they’re pretty much already closed at this point, he rereads Alex’s last paragraph. Letting the warmth of it, and one final, comforting thought carry him into the soft paradise of a nightmareless sleep. 

_ “I love you too, Alex Claremont-Diaz.”  _


End file.
